The Lobster Will Make You Feel Uncomfortable In Ways You Never Have Before

The Lobster is a film with a singular, unparalleled style. It's a narrative that asks for suspension of disbelief in a way that may feel occasionally uncomfortable, pushing the viewer to accept a world that is both strange and familiar. The premise is simple: In the near future, single people are displaced out of the city into a countryside hotel, where they have 45 days to find a romantic partner. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choosing and released into the wild. It's gets more complex as the film, out today in the U.S., goes along, but to say more destroys its eventual effect. For director Yorgos Lanthimos, who wrote the script with Efthymis Filippou, the film doesn't take any viewpoint on singledom.

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"It is a world that we've created so there are very different rules and we don't really know the answers to all of these rules and how things work," Lanthimos says. "But in general I'm not a huge believer of too much analyzing the material or characters. I find that performances become too self-conscious, too obvious." Despite being the director, Lanthimos admits he sometimes feels like an audience member—he, too, watches the film unfold, as if it's out of his control. "I like to be in the dark, as well," he says. "I don't want to know what the actors have decided about their character or what they're doing, because I find it much more useful if I'm there observing it without having an idea of what they have in their head."

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The cast, which includes Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and John C. Reilly, weren't given much instruction. Lanthimos told them not to spend too much time with the script and didn't offer a rehearsal period. Instead, the cast was dropped into the world of the film as quickly as the viewers, uncertain and trying to find their way.

"I didn't take his advice-slash-direction-slash-order as clinically as I may have," Farrell admits. "It was a very different experience. There was no conversation about character backstory at all. If you want to make Yorgos's fucking toes curl in his shoes ask him where I am coming from, what I am feeling? He didn't want to know." Farrell stars as David, a man who has recently divorced and whose brother has been turned into a dog, seeks to break free of the imposed system.

The film is inherently a sci-fi tale, despite feeling grounded in reality, and reveals a bizarre, often surreal world where people are ritualistically paired off. The aspects of this world are deeply specific (for example, couples are assigned children if they fight too often), but we're offered almost no explanation as to why. Instead, the viewer steps into a preexisting world and must accept it without question. "It was great because there was no history, and it's like there is no future," Farrell says. "There was nothing before page one. It was just this very particular chapter in time that was presented to me as an actor. And it was presented to the audience, as well, and it asks you to immerse yourself in that. That alone is enough."

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Farrell's performance is notably withholding. His character, stumbling through grief as he's forced to undergo the daily rituals of the hotel (some both violent and unusual), is restrained in his emotional delivery. It's a far cry from Farrell's recent work in True Detective, and it reveals a different facet of his acting sensibility. That might be because the actor feels almost no personal ownership of the role, and he purposefully left himself out of it as much as possible.

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I think the movie is saying things... But it depends who you are and what the lens of your experience is.

"Every character—even if it's a character you look at on paper and think, 'That person is very different than me,'—you will be [a part of that person] by virtue of how you judge the character, how you feel the character, or how you give life to the character," Farrell explains. "It's your perspective that is joining this life that exists on paper. I wanted to keep away from all that and not have any personality in it at all. There was a massive liberation in that because what it was asking me to do, I felt, was leave your personality and your perspective at the door. And inevitably those things are going to be in there, but in a much more minimal way than my work usually is."

For Reilly, who plays a fellow guest at the hotel suffering from a lisp, Lanthimos's restrained directing style took some getting used to, but inevitably it was as refreshing for him as it was for Farrell.

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"Yorgos's previous films have a very distinct acting style," Reilly says. "They're kind of deadpan and not overly communicative or overly emotional. I tried to honor that. But when I asked Yorgos about it, he was like, 'Just do what you normally do. Don't worry about doing some kind of style of acting. Keep it simple. I'll say something if it's not working.'" Lanthimos took that to an unexpected extreme, barely giving Reilly any notes throughout shooting. "He's somewhat reserved and formal in the way he talks, and on set most of the time he seems miserable," Reilly continues. "He never gives compliments and he rarely even talks to you during the shooting day. He's more looking at the shot and making sure thing are being executed in the way he envisioned. But I really prefer that to the opposite."

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He adds, "What's really interesting in movies in when you sit down with the other actor and this other actor is someone you've just met and you're like 'What's going to be their take on this?' Those moments where people reveal themselves to each other, if they happen on camera, are what makes things engaging to watch."

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The Lobster, which initially premiered a year ago at Cannes, has earned an incredible array of responses, each of which seems to address a different angle of the story. For many, it's about what it means to seek a romantic partner—what drives us to couple up, and on what grounds do we make that connection? For others, it's about loss. The film looks, sometimes violently, at how we grapple with the world around us and how other people impact that struggle.

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"If you just lost someone, if your mother just died, some parts of the [film that are] about people moving on without you [may] really resonant with you," Reilly says. "If you're someone who just broke up with your boyfriend, then other parts of the story might resonate. I think the movie is saying things—every piece of art says something. But it depends who you are and what the lens of your experience is."

"If the film is structured in an open way, then people will lean toward one of those elements according to who they are, [what] their experiences [are], and even their mood," Lanthimos adds. He insists that he wasn't interested in promoting one particular theme; the film, instead, gives back whatever you bring into it. "That's what I find interesting about making films like this," he says. "It allows people to not only have their interpretation, but how they engage with it is very much up to them, as well."

For Farrell, The Lobster brings to light ideas about loneliness and what it means for a human being to exist in a solitary state. It doesn't pick a side or determine whether it's right for us to create couples, but the film does question why we're all in such a hurried frenzy to find a soulmate.

"I think people have always been pushed toward partnering up," Farrell says. "We try to escape our loneliness as much as possible because it sucks sometimes to be alone. It seems like a very natural thing. I'm not saying it's unnatural to be alone, but it seems very natural to want to share your life with somebody." But from Farrell's perspective, the film is not about an obsession with monogamy, or romance, or seeking partnership. Rather, it's about the societal force that drives that desire in most of us to find another person who can make us feel complete. "This story isn't there to poke holes in what has become established in today's contemporary world with Tinder and Facebook and online dating at all," he says. "It's addressing, in its own mercurial way, the things that give birth to the desire to explore social media, or to go to a bar, or to agree to an arranged marriage. It's really about human behavior and relationship and loneliness and the systems we live under, whether they're ideological or political or religious or socially imposed. How much power, how much self-control, how much self-determination do we have as human beings? How much do we exploit it? How much do we fall asleep to it? At its core, I found it to be a really human story."

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